Posted on June 22, 2000

• Ever since I heard that Vue d’Esprit 3.1 was multi-threaded, I’ve wanted to try it out. Sunday I downloaded the latest beta (Ver. 6), installed it, and got busy setting up a scene to show off this “citidel-looking” mesh that I had built in Lightwave. I was hoping to post it for you back on Monday, but unfortunately that was not to be.

  To make a long story short, Vue 3.1.6 seems to have a nasty bug. From what I can tell, a memory leak occurs during the last anti-aliasing pass. It slows the render to a crawl, and then crashes the program entirely just when the render is complete. As you might imagine, it is no fun to render an image for 12-14 hours only to lose it all at the very last moment. This has happened to me 4 times this week and, of course, the files created with the new beta will not open in previous versions of the software.

  The bug only occurs when I try a “render to screen” at 1600 x 1200. Vue has another option (“render to disk”), but for some strange reason the render times are multiplied by 10 whenever it’s used. I decided to render the image at 1152 x 864 using my main workstation, and render it to disk at 1600 x 1200 using one of my other computers.

  Hopefully that explains why this latest image, Overlord is a couple days late and a size smaller than I usually post. The 1600 x 1200 version will be up shortly (I hope). I didn’t intend for this to be a big time consumer, just a fun refresher exercise with a neat software package that I’ve been neglecting. The fun part, I guess, was in putting the scene together. Hopefully it shows and you’ll enjoy the wallpaper.

  I’d love to hear your comments on this image, and/or Vue d’Esprit, so don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

  I think I’ll move on to something else now….